"...attempt to make a story out of what WE all know to be SOP..."
Good on you, Busdriver. Unfortunately, not all journalists have ATPs. Nor have they been firefighters, or merchant captains or even deck crew, or doctors, or poets or schoolteachers or modern dancers or film producers or Nascar drivers...but every day, they have to write about these things, and they do the best they can. They mean well, believe me.
In fact they mean better and try harder than many of the people who criticize them for lacking specific knowledge in specific areas, though many of these critics are people who couldn't even tell you who won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, or what a metastatic cancer is, what the argument about charter schools (in the U. S.) is all about or the difference between serial and parallel hybrid cars. Which is what mosst journalists need to be informed about every day.
Actually, your free-falling gear pales in significance against most of them.